Agency prepared to take over task from airlines

After years of preparation, the Department of Homeland Security told a congressional committee last week that it has met all the requirements to implement its new Secure Flight program starting in January 2009. Under Secure Flight, the Transportation Security Administration will be responsible for comparing airline passengers’ identities against the government’s “no-fly” list and its terrorist watch list – a task that is currently handled by the airlines, and has led to significant numbers of travelers running into problems with misidentifications that slow them down at the airport or prevent them from traveling. As part of the preparations, DHS has started allowing airlines to request and store an individual’s birth date in his passenger record, in order to prevent false matches when someone checking in for a flight has a name identical or similar to one on the watch lists. “By voluntarily providing this limited biographical data to an airline and verifying that information once at the ticket counter, travelers that were previously inconvenienced on every trip are now able to check in online or at remote kiosks,” TSA said.

The agency noted that airlines have used different procedures in terms of how they matched passenger names to the watch lists, and to what degree they checked for variations on a name. Under TSA’s centralized Secure Flight program, the agency said, it will be able “to better match passengers to terror watch lists while significantly reducing the number of misidentifications to these lists,” and to guarantee privacy protections for individuals. The government currently has an appeals program in place for persons who believe they are wrongly identified as someone on a watch list (www.dhs.gov/trip). But the National Business Travel Association told Congress it would still like to see passage pf pending legislation that would streamline such appeals through a newly created Office of Appeals and Redress within DHS. NBTA, an organization of corporate travel managers, said that in a recent survey of members, 40 percent said some of their travelers “are repeatedly subject to secondary screening at airports, and many who have sought redress through the current system have not yet received clearance.”